


VOLLEYBALL IS A SPORT WHERE YOU'RE ALWAYS LOOKING UP

by oikawafflehouse



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Growing Up, POV Second Person, Post-Time Skip, SPOILERS FOR CHAPTER 395, the author gives emotional baggage to an undeserving character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25717285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oikawafflehouse/pseuds/oikawafflehouse
Summary: There is a mountain before you, and he's asking you:Do you like volleyball?
Comments: 36
Kudos: 99





	VOLLEYBALL IS A SPORT WHERE YOU'RE ALWAYS LOOKING UP

**Author's Note:**

> [to the future beyond.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wYN8cWiISA)
> 
>   
> this is an ode to that one kid from chapter 395 who said he thought volleyball was boring. to Ushijima. of all people, my sweet summer child. the audacity. that kid fears no man.

i.

There is a mountain.

He bends down to greet you with knees that creak and a smile that makes you wonder if you’ve done something wrong, and if you focus hard enough, you can almost hear the ground below groan in protest from having to support such a weight.

The mountain before you is impossibly tall, and it’s not just because the top of his head scrapes the clouds above. It’s not because he wears the sun like a crown, or because he looks like he could fight any villain from Naruto and win, though it’s not that big of a deal because you’re sure you could do the same.

It’s because your wrist still stings from the white, half-moon indentations your mother left when she squeezed your hand too hard in excitement from when she first saw him. It’s because you look up and up and up with your neck craned back to meet his eyes and you’re wondering how many times he’s hit his head on a door frame.

It’s because he’s here; a mountain right in the middle of downtown Osaka, surrounded by bright lights and miles of cracked concrete riddled with broken bones and paper people who each carry their own white flag. Paper people who don’t have the time to look up at mountains or impossible heights.

Paper. They’re all sheets of paper compared to this mountain.

There is a mountain before you, and he’s asking you: _Do you like volleyball?_

The question takes you by surprise. It has never once occurred to you that mountains could play volleyball, and the image it creates doesn’t match the whispered secret you’ve left tucked away on the right side of your brain. Mountains are supposed to kill giants with a single blow and make it look easy. They’re supposed to watch you as you grow up and deter you from ever becoming as tall as them with shaking fists. They’re supposed to take your dreams and grind them until they’re nothing more but sand.

You glance over at your mother who’s searching her purse with excited hands for a pen so she can get his autograph, as if he weren’t already more permanent than anything else in the world.

Did you like volleyball? You’re not sure you know the answer to this, but you do know enough to recall that your mother used to play volleyball in high school and college, back when her hair used to be shorter. That she was something called a _middle blocker_. You know enough to realize that your mother is not a paper person, but instead a tree who offers you protection and lets in gaps of sunlight with branches that reach for the sky, yearning to be more. Yearning to be a mountain.

(You know enough about the volleyballs gathering dust in the hallway closet at home).

You’re still in elementary school, though, so you don’t know as much as you think you do. You still hate the taste of snow peas and you still carry dreams of hotel swimming pools within the depths of your eyes. You have yet to see the world on fire.

You don’t know what it’s like to watch your mother cry, so when you finally answer the mountain’s question after a moment's hesitation, it comes out as thoughtless and careless as your handwriting at school, as some of the things you and your friends say with your elbows linked together and wooden sticks that are actually swords in hand.

It comes out like this:

_Um...Nah! Not really. It’s boring! If I see a game on T.V., I change the channel._

The answer drops to the ground like a used napkin and it leaves a sour taste in your mouth, but it's nothing compared to the pained look the mountain’s giving you, as if you were the one to shove an entire lemon down his throat instead. A look that shrinks you down in size.

You start to feel bad about your flippant response, but pretty soon the mountain has turned his back on you to offer up his signature to your mother.

You notice, through the hazy shade of an afterthought, that he writes with his left hand, just like you.

The moment is over quickly and soon the dream fizzles out as your mother drags you away again with a happy smile that could paint all the walls in the world yellow. A dream, because mountains aren’t supposed to play volleyball or write with their left hand or be anywhere even near downtown Osaka.

A dream, because if you think about it too hard, it’ll become seared on the back of your eyelids like the words _yes_ and _no_.

A dream that leaves you wondering in the early hours of the morning: _what’s so great about volleyball?_

You’ll eventually learn, and it’ll fill up every single hotel swimming pool you carry within your eyes (and your heart).

ii.

Ushijima Wakatoshi.

That’s the name of the mountain, you find out later from your peers at school. It’s strange seeing his face on the glossy cover of the sports magazine your friends are all huddled over like noisy seagulls at their desks during lunch.

He seems smaller to you when he’s stuck in a paper box with nowhere to go.

You try to explain this your friends this, but they brush you off in the way that elementary school students and labrador puppies tend to do, and the next topic of conversation comes swinging at you with frightening velocity. You have no choice but to jump in feet first with your head still bobbing in and out of the water.

It doesn’t bother you as much as you’d think it would, that your friends don’t believe you. It just felt important to you for them to know that Ushijima Wakatoshi is not a paper person but a towering mountain instead. Then again, the brand new superhero movie that’s coming out this weekend or the subject of Hirano-kun’s crush could be just as important, and you just don’t know any better.

Then again, it all could have been just a dream.

_Yes_ or _no_?

iii.

In elementary school, you don’t usually have to worry about mountains, and so the entire world becomes your playground. You have room to extend your arms and breath, room to stretch out the golden tail-end days of summer as far out as you want to until spring becomes nothing more than a distant memory and autumn a place you’ll never quite reach.

You have room to kick that beat-up soccer ball across the green field, room to hit that baseball until it disappears among the stars and lands somewhere on Jupiter.

You have all this space and the sprawling days of childhood laid out before you like a map, and so you follow it carefully, using the brightest colored pencils you own to mark your way, until it looks something like this:

Soccer: feet on the ground, heart forward. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

Baseball: a melted popsicle. The glare of the sun. Making everything look effortless.

Volleyball: _???_

_No_ , you decide one day, with one foot on the soccer field, the other planted on home base. _No_ , _I do not think I like volleyball after all._

iv.

You hold onto this belief until middle school, when your world is no longer a playground but instead a house and a school and a parking lot where you and your friends practice spitting watermelon seeds at each other. Where you grow up and bare your teeth up at the sky.

You hold onto this belief, as tight as you hold onto your childhood, until the planets realign themselves above you.

You wear clothes that don't seem to fit you right anymore, and you have a pimple on your nose that stays there for two weeks so you name it ‘Bean.’ You become surrounded by girls who have weed wackers for hearts and boys who are as magical as the cast of Sailor Moon, and suddenly you’re following them in and out of classroom doors, creating a new map for you to follow that’s confusing and bittersweet all at the same time.

Streetlamps and radio towers that are on their way to becoming mountains stalk the hallways of your school, and soon those hotel swimming pools of yours have become empty.

There is a mountain (here, there, and everywhere).

You find yourself looking towards the ground a lot. At your grass-stained sneakers. At the earth that never trembles in your wake when you take the field.

Soccer has not been kind to you.

Baseball has not been kind to you.

Volleyball, though. Volleyball has been different for you.

It starts to become familiar to you, in small bits and pieces hidden away in the corners of your life. Your mother, clearing the dust from the reaches of that hallway closet, asking you if you’d like to practice passing to each other. You see it in the magazines and the billboards that line every street in Osaka and all of Japan, creating its own kind of magic that pulls you up like a tractor beam. A heartbeat heard from all over the world.

You see it more and more on T.V. as the Olympics grow near, when you see that mountain of yours, playing professional volleyball and ripping a hole in reality with nothing but his left hand. Redefining immortality. Redefining what it means to be a giant-killer. You see it when the National Team for Japan is announced, and every single one of them is a mountain in their own right, with no paper in sight.

Volleyball has become different for you, until it becomes familiar as waking up every morning with the sun in your face. As familiar as the sight of Mount Kita appearing through your car window every summer when you’re driving with your mother, letting you know you’ve almost arrived to your grandparent’s house once more.

As familiar as the dream that you let back into the folds of your memory, branding it with a simple word.

_Yes_ , you say when a frazzled third-year boy with glasses that don’t sit right on the bridge of his nose asks you if you’d be interested in becoming a manager for the middle school's boy’s volleyball team next year. To follow in his footsteps. To connect.

_Yes_ , you say when you reconsider that question from long ago under the bright lights of your school’s volleyball gymnasium, the thrum of the cicadas outside matching the beat of the volleyball hitting skin and wooden planks, the sound of it all creating an invisible tattoo on the side of your wrist.

_Yes_ , because you’ve carried this understanding with you in the hollows of your eyes and your heart until it has splashed through every hotel pool in existence.

_Yes_ , because you make this decision one summer day with your feet on the floor of a volleyball court as you watch these boys shake the earth and slice the sky in half with smiles that balloon up inside you. 

_I think I like volleyball after all._

v.

You are fourteen years-old, and there is a mountain.

He stands before you, through the screen of the T.V. You’re wearing his name on your back, and he’s tearing down walls and killing giants. Destroying expectations.

There is a mountain, and he’s only one of the few that you know.

You don’t know about the mountain in a small, northern town; a mountain that the boy on T.V. with the orange hair has learned to swallow. You don’t know about Heartbreak Hill, or the mountains of Brazil that have turned their own fair share of dreams into sand.

You don’t know of iron walls or blue castles or owls with hearts of gold or of cats slinking through back-lit alleyways. You don’t know about any of this, but you do know about Ushijima Wakatoshi; a story within a story. Yours connected to his.

It’s a special part you find within yourself, a connection you make and hold tight. A bird, flying in the space between your lungs.

A connection all of us make, every Sunday, over and over again as fireworks shoot out of our chests in excitement, as tears becoming starting points for a new renaissance. As you all say, _I pick this one_ , a meaningful story that becomes more than paper and ink to hold close to your heart because you never really thought you could have something like this before to call your own. Another way to redefine immortality, or what it means to be a mountain.

A story that reaches a small volleyball gymnasium, the streets of Tokyo, the beaches of Brazil, the coast of Italy. Those forty days, spread thin and far between Argentina and California, as quiet as a promise being fulfilled.

You all have your dreams.

You all have your stories.

You all have your mountains, and so you look up and up and up until the road that lies ahead with the new brightly-colored map that you've created for yourself is all you can see, until you learn how to fly high on your own.

vi.

There is a mountain, and he teaches you just how great volleyball can be.

**Author's Note:**

> come yell at me on [twitter.](https://twitter.com/oikawafflehouse)
> 
> me: wants to start writing fanfic to deal with the end of the manga, had every intention to write about characters like Oikawa and Iwaizumi, ya know the drill. 
> 
> also me: instead writes about an unnamed character who appears in only like 5 manga panels 
> 
> me: ah, yes. this is coping. 
> 
> this is the first fanfic i actually went through with and finished. i wasn't going to publish it at first, but i've been reading a lot of great stories lately that really inspired me to take this jump, and my co-star notification today was 'being yourself is exhilarating', so why the heck not. my apologies if it doesn't make much sense. 
> 
> kudos are much appreciated, but comments and feedback mean the world and most of Saturn, too, to me but please do whatever floats your boat and have a nice day! :)


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